This posting drew me a -1 troll & -1 overrated in record time.

NewLine's trilogy formula

1. Rename it LOTR

2. Gut the plot, Chapters involving nuance (Bombadil, Scouring of the Shire) are removed. Reduce all cast memebers outside fo the original fellowship to 1-dimensional supporting roles. (Denethor and sons as an '80's flavor dysfunctional family? please!)

3. Release EE's to rake in money from the more die-hard fans, replete with further plot deviations.

4. Enlarge Liv Tyler's role to be big enough to sign her sorry ass to the film.

Sorry, for my money (and Newline won't be getting any more of it) the Matrix trilogy as *film* stands head and shoulders over what they've done to Tolkein's work. The Fellowship film was well done IMO, the Two Towers film less so and my expectations for the final ... well I'm not going.

Ahh, /. where well-informed but non - conforming opinions. are just not welcome, big deal - I've been karma capped for some time.

Fastforward

Well I wound up seeing Return of the King, cause my kids wanted to see it and I gotta say this film failed to live up to even my low expectations.

Now when I call myself 'well informed' I mean I've read:

Every Middle Earth related book / article Tolkein ever published

the trilogy at least 20x

his poetry/short stories

The Silmarilion, a few times

a couple of Tolkein's scholarly works

Le Morte d' Artur

Beowulf, 3 translations

So I'm not a fan[boi|girl] who didn't bother to read it at all, or not until the hype over the film.

My $0.02 on the 3rd film:

The good things:

Aragorn

The Smeagol - Deagol story, nice way to open the film.

The Rohirim, Dunharrow

<rant>

What sucked:

Arwen

The palantir scene ??? it's covered in flame? sticks to you hands?

Pippin lighting the signal fire?

Filming the progression of the signal fires?

Denethor slobbering over his food, never metioning that he has a palantir?

Gandalf throwing Denethor onto the burning pyre?

Pippin lifting Faramir off of same?

The palantir scene ??? it's covered in flame? sticks to you hands?

the battle of Minas Tirith? ---

All those catapults ???
Orcs overrunning several levels of the City?
Oilphants as a decisive element in the battle ??
No gandalf confronting the Witch King?
Merry and Eowyn being stunned by him but no explanation / lasting effect?

All that footage of Sam and Frodo in conlict?

Cutting Frodo and Sam's journey across Mordor to a few minutes of film.

Lastly, I'm sorry but why the hell didn't the director have Astin and Wood lose some weight for the Mordor/Mt Doom segment. A still pudgy Sam, carrying a Frodo who's the same hobbit as left the Shire (but with a dirty face?) It's just not believable.
</rant>

On balance, all those details matter, but what mattered to me more is all the footage they put into these non-essential plot deviations that could have been devoted to some of the nuances of the plot.

Ohh well, back to the positive side, some of the images the film developed really were well done, and I enjoyed them. I felt the *actors* mostly turned in better performances than they'd managed for Two Towers. The other stuff will be easier to let go because the films (esp. TT, return) just aren't very real to me.

Ok, this just sucks.

I'm sure /. needs to produce revenue. I've paid up for a subscription and don't often use enough pageviews that this comes up often, but when it does it's just infuriating.

Where my preferred slashboxes (from which /.'s staff allready has ignored my request that they filter some obnoxious, 0 content advertizing for 'engarde secure(sic) linux' from the Linux Security slashbox). I'm now treated to a fscking advertizement, using more space than the top-banner, so now nearly 50% of the space I allocate to a browser window is filled with advert space.

I sure as hell won't be resubscribing unless they either 1. move this down to the bottom of the slashboxes. or 2. eliminate it completely for subscribers. --- preferably both.

I do occaisionally look at the banner content on /. but I well damn well not do so with this cruft which has been added to the /. page in a way that's gonna be hard to filter out

<fuming>

Thinking of the halls of the MIT/LCS where the FSF was born


Three BSDs for the elven hackers
united under CVS

7 vendor Unixes for the dwarf admins
in their corporate halls

100 linuxen for mortal lusers
doomed to choose

One Gnu to rule them all,
One Gnu to find them.
One Gnu to enslave them all,
And in the darkness bind them

In the land of Cambridge,
where Mr. Stallman whines

So Kyle dropped SGL, flamed & ranted and generally caused trouble.

I'd already jumped to the Lunar fork and while I continue to follow both, the little time I have for doing dev work is aimed at LP.

Which is essentially pretty stable now, so it's time to get into the real work of making it more useable. Maybe I'll find the hours to do some of that. Lots of good ideas, less time / energy to make 'em work.

Nearly happy with Sorcerer linux distribution.

However I need to work out a way to get the LSM/ SELinux patches installed without hosing the sorcerer linux spell.

probably a -custom spell installing the lsm/selinux patch and running throught all of the configuration ...

alternately I could just drop the casting of linux and do it normally (i.e. manually) ... well some thinking and deciding to do here.

tomorrow